Pages

Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Review of Accelerando by Charles Stross

I
find no better analogy for the fiction of Charles Stross than the pop and fizz
of a champagne bottle being opened. Bubbling with ideas, and expressing them in
the most exuberant prose, reading a Stross novel can leave the reader reeling,
at a loss to assimilate the myriad concepts thrown their way.A few days needed to recover, Accelerando (2005) may just be Stross’
most exemplary novel.

Hailed
by many at the time as the new generation’s Neuromancer,
Accelerando plots the imaginary course of Vernor
Vinge’s singularity from near-future cyberpunk to post-human existence
among the stars.While there are perhaps
too many post-human/A.I. antecedents to make a valid argument, Accelerando pushes ahead.The tech boom of 90s paving the way for a new
perspective on technology and humanity, Stross fully futurizes the new
possibilities for language, gadgets, and social paradigms to a point impossible
in sf 50 years ago.

The
cover art is thus apt; the structure of the Accelerando—one
novelette/novella building upon the previous—describes the transition toward
singularity.A plethora of futuristic
tech and politics is employed.Ranging
from wild (e.g. sentient lobsters, alien 419 scams, etc.) to all too realistic
(e.g. computerized glasses, auto-replicating corporations, and others), Stross
sets a fast pace and turns on the turbo.

Following
the fortunes of the Macx family, Accelerando
opens with “Lobsters,” a buzzy story describing a bad couple of days in
net-politico guru Manfred Macx’s life.Possessing something of Bruce Sterling’s Ziggy Starlitz from Zeitgeist, Macx delights in re-writing
the economic and political rulebook with technology as his pen.Wheeling and dealing in a near-future
business world abuzz with everything from marketing pumped directly into the
eye sockets to netcorps that defy litigation for their complexity, Macx’s tech
prowess is trumped only by a dominatrix n ex-girlfriend.But it’s receiving a strange phone call from
somebody claiming to be Russian intelligence that turns his reality upside
down.

From
“Lobsters” on through to the ninth and final novella/novelette in the book
”Survivor,” the reader learns just how important that phone call is.Repercussions bouncing off one another, the
pace of life, quantity of technology, and most importantly the quality of
technology spin the lives of Macx and his offspring into new stratospheres of
existence.And through it all is the
cat, Aineko.

“…See, I’ve been telling Gianni for a whole while,
we need a new legal concept of what it is to be a person.One that can cope with sentient corporations,
artifical stupidities, secessionists from group minds, and reincarnated
uploads.The religiously inclined are
having lots of fun with identity issues right now—why aren’t we post-humanists
thinking about these things?” (104-105)

Stross
has boundless energy describing his future scenarios.Christoper Priest called Stross an “internet
puppy,” and in Accelerando he’s
jumping on and licking the reader nearly every second.The play of ideas certainly enjoyable, one
must measure their time, however, lest they get worn out.

In
the end, Accelerando is a lot of
highly imaginative fun.Stross reveling
in the potentialities of a Singularity event, he places zero limits on the
extent to which he envisions humanity’s evolution beyond its current,
carbon-based state.Like legos,
mini-stories in novelette and novella form are used to build the overarching
story of the Singularity. The undercurrent works itself steadily higher
until—pop, like a champagne bottle, the fizz of nerddom pours into the reader’s
brain.Version 2.0 of Asimov and
Clarke’s Silver Age creations, Stross’s future is post-human shiny but
literally Walt Whitman “I Sing the Body Electric.”